I've looked at studies from researchers running simulations on weather data sets, and yes, you need some dispatchable sources in Europe. The question is how muc

I've looked at studies from researchers running simulations on weather data sets, and yes, you need some dispatchable sources in Europe. The question is how much you need. Generally, the biggest issue seems to be heating in the winter. Heat is actually much cheaper to store than electricity. If you have a district heating system, you can even store it seasonally (storing solar heat in the summer) and be competitive with gas, even before the recent price increases. I think the main reason we don't see a lot of cheapish long term electricity storage yet is that it's not needed. Once we start producing it, economies of scale will kick in. That's at least how it worked for PV, wind turbines, li-ion batteries.